Embedded Files
Books we will read and discuss
Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier (366 pps)
Many of you may have read this novel when originally published in 1997, as I did, when it won the US National Book Award for Fiction. But then I started to re-read, and read also his novel about the West, Thirteen Moons, which I was considering for that portion of this fall's course.
His prose is utterly luscious, and so I succumbed. Just the opening chapter of Thirteen Moons sold me. So if you get a chance, read that as well. But for this course, we will read and discuss Cold Mountain, a Civil War era saga, about the South--but about much more than that as well. By the way, they made a movie of this novel (of course), starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, available on Amazon Prime. You can watch that--after--you read or re-read the book.
Books we will read and discuss
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson (595 pps)
The word "epic" in the subtitle of this novel is entirely appropriate; it tells the great untold stories of black citizens who fled the south and moved north, as well as west, in search of a better life. In keeping with the theme of this course, it is another migration. Not only is this book a New York Times bestseller, but the author is also a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Another book by Wilkerson has also been suggested, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (447 pps)
Books we will read and discuss
Under consideration:
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, archetypal Southern literature, a classic "must read" American novel, but you probably already know it well. (331 pps on AMZ)
Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, a play, but again archetypal American southern literature, and a classic. I assume you know this one as well. (212 pps on AMZ)
Faulkner, I hesitate to include him, but he's just archetypally American southern. In fact, he more or less defines it. And there are some short, and rather strange, novellas like A Rose for Emily (available online).
Books we will read and discuss
Under consideration:
Selection of short stories, because the south is known for its women writers:
Flannery O'Connor, selection of short stories
Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 1899 (144 pps) or short stories
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940 (371 pps). Also Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter, 1972, won a Pulitzer. (112 pps)
Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, 1905, (290 pps, free on AMZ), also The Age of Innocence, 1920, won a Pulitzer, Ethan Frome
Whatever we choose, we will talk about these women writers.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Strong sense of tradition. After the loss of the “genteel” Southern life (that was only genteel if you had lots of money), some literature glorified the traditions of chivalry, Southern honor, and elevation of women’s innocence, and so on. This tradition might have included an old, big house, one lived in by several generations of an important family in the town, for example.
But the sense of tradition, history, pervades Southern literature in a smaller way as well, with novels that focus on the less aristocratic element of society.
And that tradition pervades African-American literature as well, but with a far different perspective.
In short, there's a sense of history and tradition in Southern literature that generally doesn't extend to the north or Midwest, although New England has a touch of it.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Strong sense of the past. This sense of the past involves not only personal heritage, generations of a family, but also traditions, as in "this is the way it's always been done."
With some authors, Faulkner, for example, this sense of the past is so pervasive that it in fact plays a role in determining the present, and the future. In some cases, the past overpowers the present. This sense of the past as a character in his novels also explains their structure and style. See The Sound and the Fury.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
To some extent, it's a desire to reclaim the plantation south, before the Civil War, perceived as representing a gentleman's world, with manners, civility, chivalry, honor, order, and other aristocratic virtues. It's the "southern myth."
See also Agatha Christie for the British version of the aristocracy, a longing for structure, stability, order, resistance to change and therefore surety.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Family particularly, but community as well ( almost always a small town), is an undeniable presence in Southern literature. Family could be the Sartorises in Faulkner, (Yoknapatawpha county) or in more modern times, the sisters in the film Crimes of the Heart.
And these family members often provide the dramatic conflict in Southern literature, such as relationships among family members, or family members and the larger community. Dissonant values often play a role, those they grew up with as opposed to those they have adopted as adults.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics
Importance of place (setting) in a physical sense. "Place" is often so pervasive in Southern literature that it functions as a character, much as it did in the Australian literature we read last spring (the outback), not to mention of course Cold Mountain. Many of these stories could not take place in another setting.
"Sense of place" is a term Eudora Welty used to describe this phenomenon. Place centered the characters and the action both. Consider Fried Green Tomatoes by Fanny Flagg.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Emphasis on specific concrete imagery. Southern literature is usually quite descriptive, and the best writers use strong imagery as one of their important tools for bringing the story to life.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Southern gothic (decayed surroundings, bizarre behavior, insanity) can also be an element.
Faulkner is full of these gothic elements, not just as an aspect of the setting, but also as a way of underscoring this theme of the past overshadowing the present (Miss Emily, The Sound and the Fury, etc.).
Carson McCullers is another author often described as Southern Gothic. In her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she explores the isolation of misfits and outcasts in a southern town.
Flannery O'Connor could also fit this category. Her writing has been described as "sardonic" Southern Gothic for her inclusion of characters marked by disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity. Strong Catholic sense of morality.
Literature of the American South
Characteristics:
Sometimes the use of grotesque humor (humor that derives from cruelty or injury). Welty’s stories abound with this humor, as do those of Flannery O’Connor.
Use of religious imagery and backdrop of the Christian church in the setting of many of the stories. Moreover, concern with sins, redemption, and salvation often occur as themes in these novels, one example being nearly everything that Flannery O’Connor wrote.
Literature of the American West
In an article published in The Guardian in 1961, writer John Williams asks:
Given the dense history of the American West, nearly unexplored in its most fundamental aspects and potentially the richest of American myths, why has there not emerged a modern novelist of the first rank to deal adequately with the subject?
Why has the West not produced its equivalent of New England’s’ Melville or Hawthorne—or, in modern times, of the South’s Faulkner or Warren [Robert Penn]?
Literature of the American West
By the way, John Williams is the author of the novel Stoner, a volume known only to the "bookish cognoscenti," according to an article, October 2013, in The New Yorker. The article continues that "Stoner is undeniably a great book, a kind of "anti-Gatsby," whose "protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure."
Literature of the American West
Williams continues:
It is true that the Western subject has had the curious fate to be exploited, cheapened, and sentimentalized before it had a chance to enrich itself naturally.
It is true that the subject of the West has undergone a process of mindless stereotyping by a line of literary racketeers that extends from the hired hacks of a hundred years ago who composed . . . Dime Novels . . .pulp writers—men contemptuous of the stories they have to tell, of the people who animate them and of the settings upon which they are played.
Literature of the American West
Williams continues:
It is true that the history of the West has been nearly taken over by the romantic regionalist, almost always an amateur historian with an obsessive but sentimental concern for Western objects and history, a concern which is consistently a means of escaping significance rather than a means of confronting it.
In its simplest form, the conventional Western involves an elemental conflict between the personified forces of Good and Evil, as these are variously represented by cowboy and rustler, cowboy and Indian, the marshal and the bank robber, or (in a later and more socially conscious version of the formula) by the conflict between the squatter and the landowner.
Literature of the American West
Williams continues:
It is tempting to dismiss such familiar manipulation of the myth; but the formula persists, and with a disturbing vigor. However cheaply it may be presented, however superficially exploited, its persistence demonstrates the evocation of a deep response in the consciousness of the people. The response is real; but though it may have been widely identified as such, it is not, I believe, really a response to the Western myth. It is, rather, a response to another habit of mind, deeply rooted and essentially American in its tone and application.
That is the New England Calvinist habit of mind, whose influence upon American culture has been both pervasive and profound.
Beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.
Literature of the American West
Williams continues:
What has been widely accepted as the “Western” myth is really a habit of mind emerging from the geography and history of New England and applied uncritically to another place and time.
Novelists who write about the American West are "guilty of mistaking the real nature" of their subject matter. "It is not that they have hit upon the wrong myth, but that they have failed to recognize in the first place that their subject is mythic. "
Later in the article, he writes that "the American frontiersman [ventures] beyond the bounds of his known experience into the chaos of a new land, into the unknown [but] his voyage into the wilderness was most meaningfully a voyage into the self, experimental, private and sometimes obscure.
Literature of the American West
Williams concludes:
Viewed in a certain way, the American frontiersman—whether he was hunter, guide, scout, explorer or adventurer—becomes an archetypal figure, and begins to extend beyond his location in history. He is 19th century man moving into the 20th century; he is European man moving into a new continent; he is man moving into the unknown, into potentiality, and by that move profoundly changing his own nature.
He and the land into which he moves may have their counterparts in both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in Moby Dick—which is to say that, though the myth which embodies him has its locality and time, it is confined by neither. He walks in his time and through his adventure, out of history and into myth. He is an adventurer in chaos, searching for meaning there. He is, in short, ourselves.
Literature of the American West
Characteristics:
In the western novel, place or setting is again crucial; like the Australian novels that grapple with survival in the outback, these novels grapple with existence in this strange, foreign, challenging landscape.
But, whereas Southern novels focus on family and community, in these novels the individual stands alone, for the most part. It's freedom and self-determination, but it's also isolation and reliance upon oneself, for both male and female characters.
To paraphrase one reviewer, male writers focus on the epic historical events, women writers on the more "quotidian" elements of everyday life.
Literature of the American West
Ray Callahan on the "epic" story:
Historians, confronting the confusion and strangeness of the past, try to make it more comprehensible by organizing their narratives around a significant event or personality. Hence the fascination with "decisive battles," "turning points," and "key figures." The shapers of popular culture--poets, painters, novelists and, in our time, film makers and television producers--take this narrative convenience and spin myths around it. The end result is that what happened and why becomes obscured and what is believed to have happened is often a literary or cinematic construct.
Books we will read and discuss
The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, by David McCullough (353 pps)
As many of you know, David McCullough is a well known and respected writer of historical novels, based on the facts of history rather than the myths, something that our understanding of the American west has been influenced by. Using letters, diaries, and other printed materials, McCullough provides the dramatic, the personalities, and the motivations that drove these early American settlers. On a personal note, my ancestry dates back to some of these early pioneers.
Books we will read and discuss
My Antonia (145 pps), O Pioneers (125 pps), by Willa Cather
With these two novellas, the first and last of Cather's Prairie Trilogy, we turn to classics that consistently appear on multiple lists of America's best books and authors.
Could substitute So Big, Edna Ferber
The Round House, by Louise Erdrich (317 pps)
Erdrich, one of the most widely acclaimed writers of the Native American Renaissance in literature, is a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians.
On Wed. Nov. 10, she will be interviewed as part of the Seattle Arts and Lecture series (https://lectures.org/events/). That's the same series that featured an interview with Tana French by Ruth Ware.
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, will be interviewed on Sept. 28.
Books we will read and discuss
Partner in Crime, by J. A. (Judith Ann) Jance (400 pps)
For readers who enjoy the traditional mystery novel, this book partners two of Jance's detectives, J. P. Beaumont, a Seattle PD Detective, and Joanna Brady, an Arizona County Sheriff, in the same story. Jance has a third series featuring former Los Angeles news anchor turned mystery solver, Ali Reynolds. And Jance is a prolific writer. So, if you haven't read before, here's your introduction to two of her crime solvers, and you can pick the one you'd like to follow further.
Breakout Room Question
South
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, archetypal Southern literature (331 pps on AMZ)
Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, a play, again archetypal American southern lit (212 pps on AMZ)
Faulkner, the archetypal Southern writer, a novella like A Rose for Emily (available online).
Woman writer
Flannery O'Connor, selection of short stories
Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 1899 (144 pps) or short stories
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940 (371 pps). Also Ballad of the Sad Café
Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter, 1972, won a Pulitzer. (112 pps)
Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, 1905, (290 pps, free on AMZ), also The Age of Innocence, 1920, won a Pulitzer
Breakout Room Question
West
Willa Cather, My Antonia (145 pps), considered her first masterpiece
Willa Cather, O Pioneers (125 pps),
Could substitute So Big, Edna Ferber
Pick one of these three
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